Outdoor lighting fixtures are frequently subjected to breakage by criminal activities. Often, vandals will seek to extinguish the light merely for sport by throwing rocks or launching other projectiles, such as bullets fired from guns. Or, criminals may seek to extinguish the light to permit them to carry out other criminal activities, such as theft, undetected.
Other inventors have devised fixtures for protecting electric lamps from firearms projectiles. U.S. Pat. No. 4,150,422, granted Apr. 17, 1979, to E. B. Peralta, et al. for "Armored Light Projector" discloses one such fixture. The Peralta fixture, however, is designed to project a frontal beam of light which is not well suited for illuminating a large area.
O. J. Dundr in his U.S. Pat. No. 3,404,886, granted Oct. 8, 1968, for "Bullet Deflecting Device" discloses an arrangement for deflecting stray bullets away from a lamp employed to illuminate a target. Again, the arrangement there disclosed does not address the problem of illuminating a large area.
Of course, it is known to employ reflective mirror systems to direct light from a single small area source over a much larger area. U.S. Pat. No. 3,270,194, granted Aug. 30, 1966, to P. K. Lee for "Light Exposure Apparatus" shows how this principle can be applied to a photocopying light-box.
There remains a need for a reliable outdoor lighting fixture which can be employed to illuminate a large area and which will resist efforts to destroy it.